squash093_bw.jpg Preston Quick made a backhand in his semifinal match...far left is Gary Waite, bunched up on right are Damien Mudge and Jamie Bentley (white jersey).
Pro squash has returned to San Francisco at the University Club. A semifinal match attracted a standing room only crowd Wednesday evening. BRANT WARD / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT less

squash093_bw.jpg Preston Quick made a backhand in his semifinal match...far left is Gary Waite, bunched up on right are Damien Mudge and Jamie Bentley (white jersey).
Pro squash has returned to San Francisco ... more

Photo: BRANT WARD

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squash085_bw.jpg Spectators at the pro squash match followed the ball as it bounced around the glass walls in front of them. The University Club boasts one of the few doubles courts in the west.
Pro squash has returned to San Francisco at the University Club. A semifinal match attracted a standing room only crowd Wednesday evening. BRANT WARD / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT less

squash085_bw.jpg Spectators at the pro squash match followed the ball as it bounced around the glass walls in front of them. The University Club boasts one of the few doubles courts in the west.
Pro squash has ... more

Photo: BRANT WARD

Image 3 of 3

Pair makes short work of squash tournament / Businessman also plans marketing push for sport

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The entrepreneur and the athlete make news only when they lose a squash match these days, and they produced no bulletins this week on their stop in San Francisco.

Gary Waite (the entrepreneur) and Damien Mudge (the athlete) used the forum of the University Club's new doubles courts atop Nob Hill to display their dominance this time, cruising through the field to win the first pro doubles squash tournament in California since 1990.

Their 3-0 (15-9, 15-6, 15-3) victory over Willie Hosey and Clive Leach in the finals of the San Francisco Classic on Thursday gives them 13 titles in 15 tournaments on this season's International Squash Doubles Association tour. Waite and Mudge won this one without the loss of a single game, the third straight tournament they have run the table. That's nothing. They had a 24- tournament winning streak stopped last year.

Waite has been doing it for years, dominating hard-ball doubles in North America with several partners. But he seems to have found the perfect complement in Mudge.

Waite fits nicely into America's image of squash players. A Harvard graduate who lives in Toronto, Waite looks and acts like a typical businessman. He just happens to own every shot known to squash. At 37 years of age with the hint of a bald spot, Waite is a Renaissance man of sorts. He dabbles in real estate, has an art studio near his home ("Found objects, mixed media are what interest me most," he said), is president of Harrow Sports equipment, and runs the pro doubles tour along with fellow player James Hewitt.

And Waite wants to turn squash doubles into a major event some day, where players would be on salary instead of maxing out on the $50,000 a year the best on the doubles tour can make now. Waite already has hired a marketing agency to get things going.

"We would market it as an extreme sport," Waite said. "We'd like to have glass courts, a light show, announcers. In doubles, the ball travels a million miles an hour."

Squash as an extreme sport is thinking outside the box, especially when many of the spectators for this week's matches wore dark business suits and drank Guinness or white wine.

But Waite knows extreme sports. He broke his wrist a few weeks ago in a skateboarding accident. Waite is quick to point out this is the first time he lost his feet on a skateboard, his previous skateboarding accident coming when he was a teenager attempting a handstand on a skateboard.

The broken bone forced Waite to tape his wrist this week and probably cost Waite and Mudge one of their two losses this season. Another extreme- sport endeavor, in-line skating, had sidelined Mudge several years earlier, and Mudge is the prototype for Waite's marketing ideas.

A handsome Australian with long hair, Mudge looks more like a fullback who can get the tough yard than a squash player. That may not be coincidence, because squash has none of the elitist, prep-school connotations in Australia.

"It's 100 percent different than it is here," Mudge said.

There, said Mudge, kids just go to the local squash center, pay a few bucks and play all day.

"You get your Eddie Bauer stuff, and off you go," he said. "It's old- school."

There is nothing old-school about Mudge's power.

"It makes a different sound when he hits it," Hewitt said.

Indeed, the high-pitched splat produced by a wicked Mudge forehand is nearly as intimidating as the shot itself. It is players like Mudge and Waite who have created a surge in interest in squash back East, just as the popularity of racquetball, which zoomed to its peak in the 1980s, has declined.